Studies in understanding patient behavior from a multifaceted level

Jie Chen, Purdue University

Abstract

The universal healthcare environment has changed greatly over the past decade. Understanding patients’ behaviors becomes ever more necessary for healthcare providers to better adapt to the new environment and to improve their performance. With this purpose, the current research adopts the meansend model from the process perspective to investigate patient behaviors from multifaceted levels (from the means level to the end level) and to thereby discern the drivers for an overall patients’ assessments and behavioral intentions. Specifically, this research project includes three studies that are initiated from an understanding of perceived importance of the healthcare attributes (means level) and are finished by examining patient value, and patient recommendation (end level). Study I adopts a data mining technique to segment the healthcare market by means of patient preferences for healthcare attributes and to explore the difference in the demographic characteristics of these segments. The data for this study came from the individuals who received inpatient care at least once during calendar year 2005 at the largest non-profit and Catholic healthcare system in the United States. A twenty-minute telephone interview was administered to collect the data. Study II builds a conceptual framework for the relationship between patient experience and patient value as well as the impact of value on patient recommendation. In this study, semistructured observation and an exit survey are used to collect the data. Study III is an empirical study which examines the impact of hospital operations on patient loyalty measured by the likelihood to recommend. The same healthcare network provided the dataset that contained the hospital operations parameters in 2006. In sum, a number of inferences are delineated from an overall perspective of the results of the three studies: (1) Three groups of patients are segmented based on their respective emphasis on efficiency, clinical reputation, and empowerment; (2) Patients significantly value the observed experience—nonverbal interaction and waiting time and their perceived value of empowerment and responsiveness lead to patient loyalty; (3) delivering the services which are perceived to be important in purchase choice stage can also be perceived as valuable services in post-purchase evaluations; and (4) optimizing hospital staffing, CMI, and the composition of Medicare/Medicaid patients can improve patient loyalty measured by the Net Promotion Score (NPS).

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Liu, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Marketing|Health care management

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